I've spent thousands of hours editing xdcam 35 footage, using all sorts of layers and effects and my MPB (late 2013 Retnia 2.6 GHz i7 with 16gb ram) gets a little warm, but the fans don't usually kick in, unless I start doing a lot of rendering or exporting.

I now own a Sony PXW-FS5, and I'm shooting 1080 XAVC-L footage, and simply playing clips in the browser starts heating my MBP and getting the fans to kick in.

I understand XAVC-L requires some processing power, but I'm really not interested in transcoding everything to ProRes. Lots of time and disc space required for that.

What I find curious is how when I play one of my clips in Quicktime, activity monitor indicates QT is using about 6-10% CPU. That makes me think that playing these clips isn't a big problem for my mac. However when I play a clip in my browser, my CPU jumps up to about 200% CPU.

Can anyone explain why it requires so much more CPU in FCP? Right now I'm doing simple assembly, without a lot of simultaneous streams. My render bar is clear since I have raw clips in my timeline right now - not even any color correction - and just hitting play starts making my fan kick in.

Maybe I shouldn't worry. That's what fans are supposed to do. However I didn't expect such my 50mpbs XAVC clips to require so much more processing than my XDCAM 35mpbs clips.

Selecting better performance over better quality doesn't seem to make a difference.

Maybe there's something else going on. I've had more freezes and crashes of FCPX, and maybe I should do a clean install?

I'm still curious about why QT plays the files with little or no effort.

QT plays my xavc-l footage with about the same effort as it plays xdcam.

In FCPX I stacked three xdcam clips, gave them each a crop and the three streams only got my cpu up to about 150%. Still less than a single XAVC-L.

Anyone else using XAVC-L on a MBP??

And if I'm going to transcode everything anyway, I think I'd just as soon create proxies so I can delete them later, and archive the smaller original files. Meanwhile I'm going to push through using the original files and keep an eye on my cpu heat.

[Mark Morache]"I'm curious about the performance of my MBP and my XAVC footage...I now own a Sony PXW-FS5, and I'm shooting 1080 XAVC-L footage, and simply playing clips in the browser starts heating my MBP and getting the fans to kick in....when I play one of my clips in Quicktime, activity monitor indicates QT is using about 6-10% CPU. That makes me think that playing these clips isn't a big problem for my mac. However when I play a clip in my browser, my CPU jumps up to about 200% CPU....Can anyone explain why it requires so much more CPU in FCP?...My render bar is clear since I have raw clips in my timeline right now - not even any color correction - and just hitting play starts making my fan kick in....Maybe there's something else going on. I've had more freezes and crashes of FCPX, and maybe I should do a clean install?"

I played some 50 mbps XAVC-L 1080p test material on my 2015 MBP using both Quicktime and FCPX 10.3.2, and it plays OK with low CPU utilization on both. This was a native camera file and imported to the library without proxy or optimized media, and playback monitor set to full screen and "Better Quality".

I also tried removing the MXF file from the folder tree and importing with "leave files in place" -- same result: plays good on FCPX without high CPU.

Thanks Joe. I downloaded your clip. I feel like I'm getting the same results. Your clip played with a slightly lower cpu than mine because your clip is 24p and mine is 30.

I did a clean install of FCP, and I feel like my clips are playing a bit better now, but they're still up around 150% CPU, compared with 8-12% when playing directly in QT. Activity monitor showed my cpu running about 130% with your clip in the browser, and 8-12% in quicktime.

I downloaded one of your 4k clips. They ran the cpu up to about 250%

If you're getting lower CPU usage on your MBP, I wonder if the processor or the video card has changed significantly since I got my mac. Is your cpu about the same when playing your clip in FCP vs QT? Just curious.